Medicaid
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Child Uninsured Rate Hits Historic Low – Thanks Goes Mainly to ACA, Medicaid & CHIP
Like many of you I was super excited to see the first round of data from the Census Bureau looking at health insurance rates in 2014 when it came out in late September. Needless to say, 2014 was a big year for health policy changes! Today we are releasing our annual report focused specifically on…
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ACA Helps Bring Child Uninsured Rate Down To New Record Low
This year’s American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2014 provide a first look at how the implementation of the ACA is affecting coverage rates for children – both nationwide and in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Our analysis looks at the profile of uninsured children in 2014 and examines rates of change…
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Arkansas Health Care Reform Task Force Considers Changes to Medicaid Private Option
By Marquita Little, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Consultants for the Arkansas Health Care Reform Task Force released a new report recommending the Private Option become a transitional or temporary program focused on “moving people upward” to opportunities. This is on the heels of an earlier report noting the Private Option will save the…
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Taking it to the streets: New ways to get uninsured kids enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP
by Sheila Hoag, Senior Researcher, and Debra Lipson, Senior Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research Traditionally, state and local Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) staff have conducted outreach to uninsured children eligible to help enroll them into these public coverage options. Advocates have also organized public education campaigns and enrollment events. Despite dramatic progress in…
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Cancer Patient: Medicaid Expansion Could Help Save Lives Like Mine in South Dakota
Ida Sievers of Renner, South Dakota, describes in this KELO TV (keloland.com) story how she avoided going to the doctor despite feeling awful for almost two years because she lacked health coverage—then when she finally went it turned out she had untreated leukemia. Dr. Rich Wender, the Chief Cancer Control Officer of the American Cancer…
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More People Have Health Coverage in Every State Thanks to ACA; Yet Some of the Poorest are Being Left Behind
by Suzanne Wikle, Projector Director, Advancing Strategies for Aligning Programs, CLASP When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law, advocates hailed it as the most important health legislation since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965 — and one of the most important anti-poverty laws in decades as well. The monumental…
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Arkansas’s Health Care Reform Forum: Medicaid Expansion and the Private Option
How has the Affordable Care Act and health care reform directly affected consumers and access to health care? How does Medicaid expansion relate to the broader health reform effort? How has Arkansas’s Private Option affected the state’s health care system? What makes a premium assistance model appealing for health care Arkansas and other states? These…
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Many working parents in Georgia would benefit from closing health coverage gap
by Cindy Zeldin, Executive Director, Georgians for a Healthy Future It’s often assumed that if you have a job, you have health insurance. That’s not the case for many working families in Georgia, though, because our state leaders haven’t accepted the federal funding set aside for us to extend cost-effective Medicaid coverage to more uninsured…
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Child and Parent Health Issues Can Lead to Chronic Absenteeism & Impact Student Success
Editor’s Note: Yesterday we published the first half of our interview with Hedy Chang of Attendance Works. She explained how child and parent health issues can become a barrier to school attendance and future success. Today we conclude the interview. Q: Many of the health barriers to attendance that your report mentions are preventable and/or treatable…
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School Attendance and Health Care: Why Chronic Absenteeism Isn’t Just About Truancy
Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a two-part conversation with Attendance Works Director Hedy Chang. Chang spoke to us about the critical role health care can play in closing the attendance gap. Attendance Works is a national initiative aimed at advancing student success by removing barriers and encouraging children to attend school regularly. A report Attendance Works…
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Many Working Parents and Families in Georgia Would Benefit from Extending Medicaid Coverage
Georgia is one of the 19 states that have elected not to accept federal funding under the ACA to extend Medicaid coverage to parents and other low-income adults and is not actively considering plans for coverage. Consequently, parents in Georgia are not eligible for Medicaid or premium tax credits if their incomes exceed 39 percent of…
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This Grandparent’s Day, Let’s Build a Brighter Future for Our Grandchildren
By Laura Brennaman, Florida CHAIN As a grandmother, nothing is more important to me than the health and well-being of my grandchildren. Health care coverage is essential to providing my grandchildren and all grandkids with the opportunity to reach their full potential. Health coverage not only provides our grandchildren with the care they need to…
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Victory in Washington State: Medicaid Developmental Screens
By Jon Gould, Children’s Alliance of Washington Developmental screens are some of the biggest cost-savers in the field of health; early detection in primary care pays off in preventive measures in the months and years ahead. Yet the 46 percent of the state’s children covered by Apple Health for Kids, who often suffer the worst…
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Urban Study Finds Uninsured Low Income Parents Are Key Beneficiaries of Medicaid Expansion
The latest round of data from the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) measuring uninsured rates pre- and post-implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is out today and finds that parents have seen sharp declines in uninsured rates – from 17.3% in June 2013 to 10.4% in March 2015. This amounts to a…
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CMS Gives States Permanent Option to Use SNAP Data to Enroll and Renew Medicaid and CHIP
It started out as a targeted enrollment strategy – a fast and efficient way to get eligible people enrolled in the ACA’s expanded coverage options by using SNAP enrollment to identify low-income beneficiaries who were income eligible but not enrolled in Medicaid. After all, gross income eligibility for SNAP (aka food stamps) at 130% FPL…
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Why is North Carolina Getting Rid of Medicaid Managed Care Plan that Saves State Money?
Policymakers in many states have turned more and more to private managed care insurers to manage their Medicaid programs. More than half of people on Medicaid across the country are in some sort of “risk-based managed care organizations (MCOs)” and 39 states – according to comprehensive research by the Kaiser Family Foundation – use such…
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Michigan’s Medicaid Waiver Amendment: A Costly & Misguided Solution in Search of a Problem
Today, on September 1st, the state of Michigan submitted an amendment to its Section 1115 Medicaid expansion waiver to comply with a deadline established by state law (PA 107 passed in 2013). The same state statute specifies that if the changes described in the amendment are not approved by December 31, 2015 that the expansion…
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Early Returns From Medicaid Expansion: Studies Find New Enrollees Are Accessing Needed Care
One of the key arguments that opponents of expanding Medicaid make is that there is no point in doing so because access is so poor in Medicaid that it won’t actually help the intended beneficiaries get the care they need. There is certainly room for improvement in access to care for Medicaid beneficiaries, and it…
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Unintended Consequences of the ACA: Retraction of Medicaid Eligibility for Parents in Connecticut
By Sharon Langer, Connecticut Voices for Children Research has consistently demonstrated that insuring parents is good for their health and their children’s. Children of parents insured through Medicaid are more likely to be covered and receive regular check-ups. In 2007, when Connecticut aligned its Medicaid income limit for parents and children at 185% FPL it…
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Report Underscores Connection Between Children’s Health and Educational Opportunity
By Sean Miskell Access to quality health coverage for children is certainly important for its own sake, and evidence increasingly suggests the way in which health is connected to other crucial aspect’s of children’s development such as education. A new report from the Education Commission of the States sheds further light on these connections and…
